1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to campaign offers and rewards systems and methods, and more particularly to campaign offers and rewards systems and methods that process and extract information about items purchased based on any receipt.
2. Description of the Related Art
One of the most common concerns for many businesses is the need to develop fresh ways to acquire new customers and to retain current customers. There are currently a number of campaign offers and reward programs in place across many different merchants and products that attempt to build customer loyalty and attract new consumers. These types of programs tend to reward consumers for shopping frequently for products at the sponsoring merchant and are usually tied to the overall basket spend, rather than purchasing specific products, and certainly not for buying specific products over multiple shopping trips.
Incentive campaign reward programs, in which incentive companies contract with sponsoring companies for programs to promote sales of the sponsoring companies' products or services, are well-known. Incentive campaign reward programs include discount coupon programs; customer loyalty programs, such as frequent flyer programs, and promotional games, such as sweepstakes prizes, scratch-and-win games, and the like, in which a sponsoring company's products or services are won by successful participation in the incentive campaign reward program.
Incentive campaign reward programs offer rewards and incentives to modify behavior of individual consumers and to direct the consumers to some pre-determined action, such as the purchase of products or services upon visiting a retail site, viewing advertising, testing a product, or the like. Companies use rewards and incentives to increase awareness of product offerings, to launch new products, to attract the attention of a newly identified audience, to differentiate products to encourage certain behavior, to obtain information, and for other purposes.
Traditional incentive campaign offers and rewards systems suffer drawbacks in terms of campaign creation, budgeting, convenience of tracking data, changing promotions, return on investment, and the like. For example, for a consumer who participates in multiple incentive programs it may take time and effort to track his or her participation in each program. For example, time is required to keep track of loyalty points earned in each separate incentive program. Therefore, when a consumer receives an offer to participate in an incentive program, the consumer may decide against participating in it, not because the incentive program is not attractive, but because the cost to the consumer, in terms of the time and effort to tracking another incentive program, exceeds the expected benefit of the incentive program. Accordingly, a consumer need has arisen for a streamlined system and method for tracking consumer participation in a variety of incentive programs from different campaign sponsors.
A similar problem exists for sponsoring companies who wish to offer campaign promotions. The collective costs of creating incentive campaign rewards programs, administering the programs, tracking the participation of consumers in the incentive campaign reward programs and fulfilling the rewards or prizes won in such incentive programs may exceed the benefits of offering the incentive campaign rewards program. These costs may be particularly high in instances where the activities associated with an incentive program must be carried out by different companies, or by different organizations within the same company. In just one small example, a clerk at a participating merchant may violate the terms of a particular campaign and allow a consumer to receive rewards on more than the campaign designated. Furthermore, the sponsor of a campaign may find itself rewarding its least economically attractive customers who are deal-driven and not likely to be brand advocates or loyalists in the future. Accordingly, a need has arisen for a unified campaign offers and rewards system that provides for program generation and administration, data tracking and rewards fulfillment.
Existing incentive campaign offers and rewards programs do not meet the entire needs of both consumers and sponsors associated with incentive programs. One form of incentive campaign rewards program that is used extensively is that of promotional mailings. The processing of promotions, i.e., providing the appropriate check or discount coupon to the customer as a reward for the initial purchase, involves high volume and labor intensive activity, including collection, verification and organization of initial proofs of purchase and related information, preparation of the checks, coupons or other items using preprinted stock provided by the sponsor in connection with the particular promotion, and finally the sorting of individual items based on their mailing destinations.
At any given time, a typical provider of promotion services is involved with many different promotions of various sponsoring manufacturers. Preprinted forms, when provided by different sponsors, can vary in size and shape, thus creating the need to handle individual promotions separately. This increases handling expense, not only in added labor, but also in the mailing cost, as it is difficult with a single promotion to accumulate a volume of items sufficient to qualify for certain reduced postage rates, e.g. the reduced rate available for mail presorted by zip code of the destination. Manual recombination and sorting of items for multiple promotions would be prohibitively expensive.
Another form of a promotional program is coupon distribution and redemption. Many problems exist with the traditional coupon distribution and redemption system. For example, few consumers go through all the steps necessary to redeem coupons, and the consumers who do go to the trouble of redeeming coupons are disproportionately extremely price-sensitive and adept at extracting maximum value from incentive programs, often combining multiple coupons and store coupons to receive products at little to no out of pocket cost, making their redemptions a money-losing proposition for the product's manufacturer and limiting the effectiveness of the overall campaign. Additionally, many more attractive consumers forget to bring coupons that they have clipped and saved to the store, while even more disregard the coupons completely. Thus, reluctance by a “typical” consumer or a “desirable” consumer to take all necessary steps partially defeats the manufacturer's purpose for offering the purchase incentive in the first place. A manufacturer distributes coupons with the expectation that the coupons will induce sales of its product by offering a discount. However, when the coupon is forgotten or disregarded, the consumer is usually not aware of the incentive when he is selecting a product among different brands at the retail store.
A further problem with traditional coupon redemption systems is verification. Because the verification of redemption conditions is performed by a check-out clerk using point of sale (POS) systems, sometimes the programming of the POS systems do not properly enforce a campaign's rules. As a result, campaigns are oftentimes overcharged for offers without the benefit of the required purchase.
The introduction of the digital computer and the computer network eliminates some of the inconveniences of conventional incentive campaign rewards programs, particularly those that relate to data tracking and manipulation. The digital computer is a powerful data processing tool that allows a user to organize, store and analyze data at volumes and rates that would be impossible by any prior known techniques.
Computers have been used in connection with incentive campaign rewards programs and other programs that have characteristics in common with incentive programs, but known computer incentive programs address some, but not all of the drawbacks of traditional promotions. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,053,955 to Peach et al. discloses an improved process of printing and assembling coupons. Peach et al. discloses a computer-based system for merging certain information for various promotions, so that a single stream of data can be used as a source for printing and mailing coupons for multiple promotions. Thus, the system of Peach et al. reduces some of the paperwork associated with single-promotion systems, but it merely mitigates, rather than solves, the problems inherent in paper-based promotions.
Computer-based promotional games are also known. Such games include scratch-and-win games, treasure hunts, video pinball and the like. Such incentive programs have advantages over paper promotions, in that data regarding participation is easily stored and manipulated. However, existing incentive campaign reward programs do not solve all consumer and sponsor needs. In particular, such promotional games do not assist consumers in tracking participation in multiple promotions and do not assist sponsors in generating incentive programs, tracking participation in incentive programs and fulfilling rewards and prizes.
Computer-based systems exist for tracking some aspects of consumer participation in incentive programs. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,056,019 to Schultz et al. discloses an automated purchase reward accounting system and method. In particular, Schultz et al. discloses a marketing method for providing manufacturer purchase reward offers by automatically tracking the purchases of member consumers through the use of bar-coded membership cards and using the purchase records in a data processing system to determine if the required purchases have been made to earn a reward. Each member consumer receives a reward booklet disclosing the available reward offers, a periodic status report indicating the member consumer's progress toward earning rewards, and a reward certificate for those rewards earned. The card-based system of Schultz takes advantage of certain data processing capabilities of computer systems and certain data storage capabilities of electronic card technologies; however, among other drawbacks, the system of Schultz does not address the need for a system that assists sponsor companies in generating incentive programs, in tracking participation of consumers in multiple incentive programs, or in fulfilling rewards.
The computer network offers the possibility of improved systems for offering incentive programs and for tracking participation in an incentive program. By linking together several computers and by providing shared resources and cross-platform communications, the computer network provides improved access to sophisticated applications by users at remote locations.
One of the most widely accepted and heavily used networks is the Internet. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks formed into a single world-wide network. A user, through the Internet, can interactively transmit messages with users in different countries. Similarly, a user in the U.S. connected to files and libraries and other jurisdictions such as Europe and Asia can download files for personal use. Accordingly, the Internet computer network provides strong communications functions similar to the communications functions provided by ham radio operators. Moreover, the Internet computer network acts like a universal library, providing electronic access to resources and information available from Internet sites throughout the world.
Various systems and methods are known which permit a sponsor to track data of multiple parties in databases and to update information in the databases based on transactions entered into by the parties to the transactions. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,664,115 to Fraser discloses an interactive computer system to match buyers and sellers of real estate using the Internet. Similarly, banks, credit card companies, and other financial institutions have developed computer-based systems that track client account information and update the information upon entry of various transactions. Some such systems involve use of electronic cards and operate over computer networks. Such systems have requirements peculiar to their respective industries, and none of the existing systems address all of the problems inherent in known incentive programs, particularly the problem of the need for an incentive program system that conveniently tracks participation while offering automated generation of incentive campaign reward programs and automated fulfillment of rewards won in incentive programs.
Computer incentive campaign reward programs are offered on the Internet; however, such systems are generally offered by a single sponsor and are generally limited to offering consumers the ability to participate in incentive programs. Known campaign offers and rewards systems do not offer sponsors the ability to conveniently generate incentive programs, to track participation of consumers in multiple incentive programs, or to provide for automated fulfillment of rewards.
Another important drawback of known computer incentive campaign rewards program systems is that the obligation to fulfill the rewards promised in a promotional campaign is often a logistically difficult and expensive task. The coordination of delivering or arranging for the retrieval of the rewards for the specified winner, in volumes that permit successful incentive programs, requires coordination of prize inventory, systems and information.
There are numerous problems with current incentive campaign offers and rewards programs. The consumers who receive and redeem offers, such as coupons, may not have the purchasing characteristics to make the incentive, provided by the offer, efficient for the campaign sponsor. When an offer, i.e., coupon, is distributed to a large population, and not tied to a specific individual, the number of coupon redemptions is not known at the time of creation and distribution. There is a great deal of uncertainty in determining the redemption rate of that offer (i.e., coupon), and the associated costs to merchants or product producers, e.g. the campaigner. Current campaign rewards programs do not provide the campaigner with certainty about how much of a campaign will be redeemed. Another problem with campaign reward programs and systems is that they do not look at the state of a campaign budget and make a decision as to whether it makes sense to give a proposed recipient the offer. Yet another problem is that campaign reward programs of today do not have a cross-retailer shopper's purchaser history and the campaign sponsor offer requirements, e.g. the budget of the campaign. Still a further problem of campaign reward programs is that there is a lack of control of the offer redemption mechanism. Yet another problem with campaign offers and rewards systems is that there is no convenient way to run multiple offers concurrently and target offers and specific consumer segments.
There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that processes and extracts information, in particular, information about items purchased based on a digitized receipt. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that provide offer creation, distribution and redemption, payment, fraud detection, and campaign reporting. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that control an offer's redemption mechanism for campaign rewards. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that process receipts in real time as they are received. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that enable campaign sponsors (i.e., advertisers) to run simultaneous campaigns and to create multiple purchase offers over time. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems with a predictive model function that uses information from receipt processing and determines values representing statistical correlations from the receipt processing. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems with analytics that performs analysis of shopper purchase data without integration with retailer POS systems.
There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that has taxonomy of products from different advertisers. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that, (i) predicts a probability that a shopper will redeem a given offer, (ii) estimates the reward the shopper will be owed when she redeems the offer, (iii) calculates an expected amount of a campaign budget that will be consumed if the shopper is presented with that offer, (iv) estimates a payout that the campaign sponsor is likely to realize by providing the shopper with the offer, and (v) appropriately transfers payment for a validated offer from the campaign budget to the shopper. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that identifies receipt data, including line items, and ties SKU's from different receipts to create a list of products and services not matched to campaign offers and advertisers. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that creates and uses taxonomy for goods and services to compare information about similar goods or services sold by different entities, retailers or service providers. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that control redemption of rewards in view of a reward budget, and turn off a campaign when a campaign budget has been met. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that provide an advertiser with a certainty about how much of a campaign offer budget will be spent. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that can estimate long term revenue which a campaign sponsor is likely to realize by providing the shopper with an offer. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems that can be coupled to a mobile device, a payment system, a digitized receipt from any platform and has a campaign offers API configured to be interfaced with a third party platform. There is a need for campaign offers and rewards systems coupled to a social network that provides a social offer from one social network member to another social network member and connects to an offer for advertiser digital properties to a social network member. There is a need for a campaign offers and rewards system that, (i) collects and analyzes user data to reduce fraud, (ii) performs detection of suspicious activity, (iii) verifies the suspicious activity and (iv) applies a punishment in response to a detection of fraud.
These and other objects of the present invention are achieved in a campaign offers and rewards system. A receipt intelligence engine includes digitized receipt processing that in operation extracts information about items purchased based on an image of a receipt from at least one of a shopping trip and an electronic receipt from an online or offline transaction. An analytics engine includes data intelligence coupled to the receipt processing and performs analysis of the receipt. In response to processing and analysis, an offer is then sold.